WASHINGTON -- It would be easy to completely trash the Toronto Raptors in this space, rip their effort, mock their focus and eviscerate their sense of team building.

It’s at a moment like this, after they collectively laid down in a 125-94 Game 4 loss that permitted the Washington Wizards to complete their first playoff series sweep in franchise history, when it’s tempting to scream “blow it up” and/or “fire this guy” or “trade these guys.”

Their rabid fans, all sides can agree, are free to do this, and the sometimes unrelenting media in Toronto is likely to give them some red meat on the subject. It is pointless to go over all the details, just know that the Wizards played some spurts of awesome ball over the past week and it coincided with the Raptors playing like junk. The result was three lopsided games and now some soul-searching in Toronto.

But really, what should they do? Was this an aberration or was this reality? Was the team that was once 37-17 this season real or is this uncompetitive showing in the playoffs the real team?

These are not easy answers. You could ask five different experienced NBA executives what to do and you might get five different answers, ranging from a complete rebuild to a tweak by bringing in a veteran leader.

This series defeat wasn’t just humbling, it has absolutely put them in a terrible position of being stuck with no clear path. Someone, and it’s likely president and general manager Masai Ujiri, is now faced with having to make some choices that are probably going to define the next 3-5 years. It’s not going to be CEO Tim Leiweke, who announced he’s leaving the Raptors in the near future.

If you think watching the Wizards hit 15 of 26 3-pointers as they did on the Raptors in Game 4 is no fun, try that conundrum on for size. It’s not fantasy sports. Rebuilding is painful and it costs people jobs, it costs people their reputations and it costs the owners millions.

You don’t go into it lightly. Ask the Los Angeles Lakers and the New York Knicks if they enjoyed this past season. Ask the Orlando Magic how the post-Dwight Howard rebuild has been. The Minnesota Timberwolves have been rebuilding so long the guy they’re rebuilding from losing, Kevin Garnett, is back there.

It’s guaranteed to be miserable with no assured end date. It’s just not simple.

Knowing what is going on around them as they sunk in the quicksand of this series, several of the Raptors' stakeholders tried to make their pleas before disappearing into the summer and wait for the answer.

“This team is not a finished product ... of what we’re going to develop,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said. “I think we’re a step ahead of the process as far as growing where we have. Go back to last year and everybody was talking about getting Andrew Wiggins and now everybody is talking about conference championships or whatever. Those expectations, we have to embrace them and take them. But we still are a young team, a growing team.”

They’re not a young team. Amir Johnson and Lou Williams have been in the league 10 years. Kyle Lowry has now played nine, DeMar DeRozan six, Patrick Patterson five. This the bulk of their core. And the growing part is debatable, too.

But Casey has to sell the chance to grow, otherwise he might be out of a job even though he just signed a new contract last summer. Casey is a defensive coach, but his team was horrid defensively all season, especially in this series.

“I think this team has accomplished so much, so fast, that the expectation level went super-high,” Lou Williams said. “We’ve been able to live up to some of it. And some of it, we really haven’t. Everybody’s going to say a lot of things about what should happen, what should be done. But this is still a very young team. We’re still growing.”

He’s a free agent this summer and, at age 28 and winning the NBA Sixth Man of the Year honor, he’s in line to get a large contract, the type of deal that establishes his lifetime earnings. He certainly doesn’t want the Raptors to go in a different direction and neither does Amir Johnson, whose contract is also up. Those guys want to be rewarded like Lowry was after last season, when the franchise gave him a $48 million deal.

If the Raptors let them walk for nothing, there’s no way to replace them and the team will slide backward. Toronto has the 20th pick in the draft, limited cap space and no young players obviously ready to ascend. That would be a step back. But if the Raptors re-sign them and lock up their cap, what can they expect with the same roster? The same result is not palatable either.

See, this isn’t easy. And the thought has probably been on the front office’s mind for some time now. Then again, it’s better than thinking about just this series.

“A horrific effort on our part,” Patterson said.

“It was a horrible series for all of us,” Greivis Vasquez said. “I can’t really explain it. We feel embarrassed.”

“There’s not many words you can say without four-letter words,” Lowry said. “We’ve got to learn from this ass beating.”

But what lesson? That is the question indeed.